Friday, November 06, 2009

How to quickly set up Application Integration Framework (AIF) for testing Axd documents

Purpose of this post
Part of the test effort on our team at MDCC goes for verifying the Axd documents shipped with the Dynamics AX application.

As many people find it hard to setup AIF, I have tried to help them by creating an automated way of doing the initial setup, which can be used for testing the documents using a 1-box setup and FileSystem transport adapter.

Download link
From the following link, you will be able to download an X++ class that initializes all the entities required for AIF to work, like the endpoints, transport adapters and channels, services, their actions and action policies.
Note, that since I am working on the Inventory team, I am filtering out the services accordingly. You can easily extend/modify this to suite your specific needs by changing the filter or adding new ones in classDeclaration and method main

Example from the standard application
To give a specific example, I encourage you to try sending a selected item electronically in form of an XML file right after executing the job.
To do that, navigate to Inventory Management\Common forms\Item details and press Send electronically button. Fill in the values for endpoint, filter on a specific item(s), and press OK.

Your screen should look similar to this:

Processing the document
The document is successfully placed into the queue for processing and sending through the gateway. If you have a batch job for processing AIF services up and running, you will soon see a file in the outbound files folder setup on the outbound channel.
If you would like to learn, how to set up the batch jobs for this, follow the below link: Start and stop the asynchronous AIF services

In order to avoid having to set the batch jobs up, I have added 2 extra methods to the class for starting the processing of inbound and outbound messages.

public static void ProcessOutboundDocuments()
{
new AifOutboundProcessingService().run();
new AifGatewaySendService().run();
}
public static void ProcessInboundDocuments()
{
new AifGatewayReceiveService().run();
new AifInboundProcessingService().run();
}

Just call the DEV_AifInitialSetup::ProcessOutboundDocuments method from a job, and the document will be automatically processed and sent on its way to the outbound documents folder.

Output
The resulting XML file for the item should look similar to the following: